


forget about me

by recryption



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Undertale Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-05
Updated: 2015-11-05
Packaged: 2018-04-30 02:57:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5147753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recryption/pseuds/recryption
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>you can just barely remember - a vague figure on the edges of your memory, tapping at the windows of your mind. you smile and wave hello. they do not reply. they blur away into black dust.</p>
            </blockquote>





	forget about me

The River Person stands at the head of the boat, their face, as it always is, shadowed beneath a dark blue cloak. The waters disappear into faint ripples behind them. You stand with them, as you always do, on your way back to Waterfall. The ethereal blue lights on the walls slowly gets brighter as you approach the exit.

“Tra la la,” they sing, as they always do. You’ve always liked their voice, no matter how repetitive their song may get. It’s rather calming. Like a lullaby, maybe. Something along those lines.

Even though it’s faint, you feel like you remember something from this scene, something familiar you read in a storybook long ago. Of a man who rows across a river of blood and bones, carrying old souls to the afterlife. Something nostalgic awakens in you, of a longing for a life you could’ve led, something that would’ve made you just as happy as you were now.

“Beware of the man who speaks in hands,” they hum, adding it to the familiar tune that they had sung a countless number of times before. You look at him strangely, for a moment. That piece of advice - was it even a piece of advice? - was certainly new. No matter how many times you had taken the boat, you hadn’t heard that phrase cross their mouth before.

You make a questioning noise in the back of your throat, but the River Person has already pulled onto shore, finishing off their strange song with the same three notes they had sang so many times before. You step off of the wooden boat, but they remain standing, waiting for your inevitable return. Or was it really for your return? Maybe they were waiting for somebody else to come, somebody to take the boat that had not come for a long time, and so they took up the skills of singing and boating as they waited for their friend.

It was sad, really, but you don’t dwell on it for too long. The stairs echo under your feet as you ascend.

* * *

The heat is nearly oppressive as you work in the lab, distracted by the constant sounds of gears clinking and papers rustling in the soft wind coming from the vents. The Royal Guards outside the lab are pacing again, their armor clanking against the plates and their feet making booming noises on the ground. You consider going outside just to tell them to be quiet, but it wasn’t really worth it. Most monsters were intimidated by you, for some reason. Really, you weren’t really... intimidating, to say the least. You were just an old skeleton hunched over old papers on a very, very “modern” table.

The calculations for the Core were almost complete, scattered over a couple hundred pages of notes and vague sketches, most of them almost completely blurred over by eraser smudges and scribbles of epiphanies in the margins. You pick up a particularly fragile page, your boney hands nearly piercing the worn paper it was written on. Oh, this one was important. You set it on top of the stack (or really, just an extremely badly organized pile) of all the other important pages.

Really, every page you had even the barest of notes on were important for the construction of the Core. You were going to have one hell of a time trying to make those legible for the working monsters to read.

Your orange eye twitches up in frustration, then your blue, twin flares of vermilion and cobalt bursting out of your pupils and momentarily blinding you. You blink a couple times to get the aftershock out of your head, brief flashes of light still winking across your vision. Ugh, that always left a headache afterwards. Just keep working and finish the Core, then you could have a break for a couple years.

Asgore was rushing you, anyway. The Core needed to be completed soon, if you and the other monsters had even the slimmest chance of surviving or making any sort of technological advancement whatsoever. You shouldn’t have accepted the position of Royal Scientist.

A headache begins to set in. You hunch down in your chair, nearly touching the paper with your forehead, as you try to make sense of what you had written on this particular piece of paper at midnight last night.

* * *

For some strange reason, the corridor seems a bit longer than it was every time you had walked through this area before. You can’t tell if it’s just your imagination, if there was an extra room added in, a small tweak in the code by the invisible hands governing your universe.

There is a patch of tall grass covering the hallway there that you had never noticed before, a few monsters watching you through the grass that hid their every move. You get the vaguest impression that _no_ , they aren’t supposed to be there, they’re glitches in the code that must be re _mov **ed**_.

The monsters glare at you with half-formed faces, with baleful eyes and claws instead of hands, but you keep your head down and keep on walking. The bird that would carry you across the disproportionately small gap would surely be in your sight soon, right?

“Can you do something about your friend?”

A voice echoes from behind you, from somewhere in the tall grass, and you whip around, waiting for a monster to emerge from the bushes. The voice remains disembodied, though. You wait. They are silent, for a long, long time.

“Yes, your friend... the one behind you, with a creepy smile.”

You exhale slowly, before making a sudden turn, trying to catch whoever it was that was watching you. There’s nobody there. The constant whisper of the tall grass is gone, the strange characters with their blank white eyes have disappeared, and all you see is the path back to the Quiet Place.

“Hey, are you okay?”

The bird is back to where they’re supposed to be. They were nowhere in sight, just a minute ago.

“You’ve been zoning out for awhile.”

The room that you were just in, with melting faces and moving shadows, was gone. It had never existed. The bird doesn’t seem to have seen anything. You rub your sweating palms against your shirt - _was_ it just a dream? An illusion conjured by your half-asleep mind?

A faint voice in your head echoes _no_ , _no_ , over and over again, like a broken record playing uninterrupted in a quiet place. You tell the bird that you would like to cross the disproportionately small gap, and it immediately cheers up.

_The one behind you, with a creepy smile._

You turn around again, slowly, just in case. Waterfall is as silent and empty as it always is, save for the sounds of rushing water and the bird, who tweets valiantly as it struggles to carry you across the river.

* * *

You survey the monsters working on the Core, all under your careful direction. It seemed to be coming together well enough. Sure, there were a few accidents, a few mistakes that could’ve been avoided easily enough, but otherwise, construction was going rather smoothly, compared to what you had been expecting. Asgore had been delighted, despite the fact that he couldn’t understand a single word of any of the notes you had made on hundreds upon thousands of sheets of paper.

He was filled with determination to finish this project, to make your New Home a better place to live, but really, you were kind of doubting the ability of it to fix _everything_. Would it really make New Home better? Sure, but not really, not in the mental sense. It had been months since you were banished to the underground. You still craved the feeling of the sun on your bones, for the sight of stars in a moonlit sky.

The Wishing Room, or so it was called, in Waterfall made a nice substitution for the time being. It was one of your favorite places to sit and think and not exist for a few hours. To look through the useless telescope situated in the middle of a brightly lit cave, and pretend that the shimmering crystals on the ceiling were an acceptable replacement for the stars.

Maybe it was time to pay another visit. For a few days. You knew that Asgore would grant you a vacation, and the mysterious Waterway Individual would be glad to give you a ride.

What was that along the wall- oh, a wire. What was that supposed to be connected to? That was supposed to be done ages ago, you had specially directed a few of them to complete the wiring in this section.

You poke around among the wires. Something stings - oh. Oh, that was bad. Tha _t w **as**_ -

That was pure magical energy.

That was also very, very bad.

You take a moment to think, as pain rushes from the tips of your fingerbones and straight into your brain.

There was Waterfall, yes, but who was that? That vague figure looking towards the tall grass, speaking to a half-formed face that didn’t look quite like a monster at all. You smile a little bit, and lean down to tap them on the shoulder, to ask them who they were, or maybe for some help for the agony in your hands.

You’ve almost completely tuned it out when they turn around, and suddenly Asgore is in front of you, asking if you’re alright. You take a moment to wonder how you didn’t die.

“Gaster, are you alright?”

You motion an ‘okay’ symbol with your shaking hands, and you are safe and alive for the time being.

The shadowy figure in your mind has walked slowly forward, to a small yellow bird. They turn around, but you are not there.

* * *

You’re in a dark room. The invisible strings puppeteering your world have acted again. You don’t quite remember how you got here, but that memory will come eventually, as it always does. Maybe when you save. Or maybe when you reload. It’ll come.

There is a tall figure in the room, fading in and out of sight, disappearing and blurring into the shadows around it until it emerges again in a bright white light. They look down at you, but you can’t quite see the details of their outfit. Their features are shadowed by the excruciatingly bright light.

You wave hello, and they emit a garbled babble of excited words, in a code you don’t quite understand, before suddenly their mouth shuts and they are cut off completely. They don’t seem quite _alive_ anymore, and they blur in front of your eyes until the room is left completely dark once more, and you are alone.

You awake in a cold sweat. The white figure is gone, only a vague imprint left in your memory, and by the time morning comes, you’ve forgotten them completely.

* * *

You’re not quite sure how you’ve gotten here. It feels almost... dream-like, to an extent. Your hands are cold and almost disconnected from your body, and you can barely make out your own hands in the blurring mess of shadows.

You are in a dark room. A shadowy figure approaches you, but you are silent. Something about this seems almost familiar, in a way. You look down at them.

They wave. You smile, but you don’t think they can see it, and begin excitedly talking about how nice it was to see somebody who knew their way around these parts, and could you please help me, and-

You are cut off. They look at you confusedly, like you were speaking in a code they didn’t quite understand. Something ripples around you, and your hands fade away into black dust.

You wake up in a cold sweat, a vague figure walking circles around your memory, smiling and waving hello at you. By the time evening comes, and the lanterns in the darkened Core have been extinguished, they’ve imprinted their footprints into your memory.

* * *

You recognize this kid.

They were that monster that tagged along with you after you had left Snowdin, right?

No. No, they weren’t.

“I wonder how scary it would be to live in a world that’s the same as ours?” they wonder, and you know that it is definitely not the monster kid from Snowdin. “But you’re not there, and everything’s the same. Would you have made a difference?”

They turn around with a half-formed face and baleful eyes, looking at you like you were an old friend. They were so, so familiar, clawing at the edges of your memory - who were they, where had you met them before?

“Forget about me,” he dismissively remarks, and turns away towards the water. “I’ll be fine.”

You turn around, after feeling a certain presence (that same, familiar presence you had felt back at the bird, you realize) watching you, observing the child. There’s nobody there, of course. You weren’t expecting much.

Turning back to the dock where the monster kid was, you realize far too late that there was nobody left there either.

* * *

You gain your first follower soon enough, if you could even call him a follower. He’s gray, with bright white eyes that scan the room with interest, and he scampers around your lab with a light in his eyes and a smile on his face.

“Oh man, this is so exciting!” He grins, nearly tripping and slamming into the ground face-first due to his lack of arms. “I can’t believe I get to meet you and- and speak with you, and-”

“Calm down, kid.” You give a good-natured laugh, and he reluctantly sits himself down on a chair, his tiny feet kicking as he waits for you to arrange your notes in a somewhat legible fashion. “So, tell me about yourself.”

You get the vaguest feeling in the back of your mind what sometime, this had all happened before. A shadowy figure walks back into your vision, speaking to the kid.

His eyes - why are his eyes so dead now, they’re dead without a trace of the previous excitement you had seen. He speaks in a monotone voice, but you still can’t catch what he’s saying- what was it? You almost had it, it was right there, you-

“Forget about me!” he exclaims, and you snap back to reality. His eyes are bright again. “I’ll be fine! Tell me about what you do as _Royal Scientist_.”

You chuckle, and look back towards your notes. You realize too late that the shadowy figure clawing at the edges of your memory has disappeared.

* * *

The first follower tells you that Gaster died. You don’t know who Gaster is, but you have that vague feeling again-

“Will Alphys end up the same way?”

You turn a disbelieving look at him, but the gray figure, with his half-shaped face, is gone. You weren’t sure what you expected.

The second one holds a shard in his hand, with a face drawn on it in artistic cracks. He rhymes and smiles with both his faces, telling you about a Doctor W.D. Gaster being shattered across time and space.

He giggles once. Twice. “How can I say so without fear?”

You feel fear settle into your own heart, while the gray smile on his face only grows. He holds out the shard to you, and you take a step away.

“I’m holding a piece of him right here.”

You glance at the face in his hand, an everlasting smile cracked into it, held together only by the smallest of chances, and the shard grins and laughs and the gray figure disappears.

The third looks at you cynically, with another great big smile and a laughing tone in his words. You tune most of it out. You’ve heard his backstory so many times before.

“Well, I needn’t gossip,” they laugh.

Gossip? Whoever this... doctor was, they were undoubtedly dead. Killed in a tragic accident. It had been stated three times over.

The face’s grin only grows wider, and wider, until you’re afraid that they’ll crack their skull wide open with just how much they’re smiling.

“After all, it’s rude to talk about someone who’s listening.”

You whip around, feeling the oh-so-familiar presence over your shoulder, but, as always, there’s nobody there.

The face is gone when you turn around again. Those followers, those gray... monsters, for lack of a better word, maybe they were dead like Gaster. Maybe they were ghosts that hadn’t passed over yet. Maybe, maybe-

Maybe you just want to live in denial.

* * *

“It’s getting darker.”

The gray face that had followed you to the unfinished Core (you had long since accepted that he was among the ranks of those of your followers - strange, that they were all mysterious and gray, but you didn’t really mind at all) remarks on the steadily darkening lights. You wave him off, instead examining the steel plates steadily peeling away from the wires inside the machine. Ugh, this problem was happening everywhere. Might as well just leave it alone, you guess.

“We should pack up soon!” The monster kid (god, he was so young, why he chose to hang around you and your other followers you would never figure out) runs circles around you. You scowl a bit, poking at the wires, before just pushing the steel back into place. It would be a problem for tomorrow.

You start walking towards the elevator near the temporary ending for the Core. Supposedly, Asgore would build his new home there, in the deepest ends of the caverns. It was kinda nice the way it was, really, but the other monsters need a place to live.

“Photon readings negative,” your first (technically, second, counting the kid) follower comments, observing one of the dials on the wall. You curse, following him over. “Very, very interesting. What do you two think?”

The other followers shrug, looking at you like you would know the answer. You make a dismissive motion, before bending back over, squinting to make out the readings on the dial. They were so small - your calculations should’ve made this thing bigger.

“I’ll be out in a second,” you say, and your followers shrug and head into the elevator. You take another moment to inspect it, before deciding that it was fine, another problem to deal with tomorrow. Just shrug it all off. It must be a problem inside, anyway-

_You’ve all seen the happiest outcome._

What?

_Neither of them could fix the machine, no matter how hard they tried._

Neither- you had four followers who knew your machine inside and out, they could fix it-

They’re not talking about the Core.

You feel a chill settle into your bones.

_No one can._

Something _pulls_ , the Core suddenly flaring up into a cacophony of excited beeps and the lasers activating, red lights throw monstrous shadows across the walls, garbled voices come out of the walls and you- you don’t know what to do, you-

You trip over a pile of exposed wire and steel.

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<ERROR>

<RESET TIMELINE?>

**Y** /N

* * *

There is a door in the wall.

It is large, imposing, made of solid steel, and it seems forbidding already. You hesitate to touch the handles.

Something is strange. Something has happened here that wasn’t supposed to happen at all - well, at least not yet. The walls around you seem almost... _fake_ , in a way, with how pristinely white it is, your waterstained boots leaving nary a mark on the clean floors. It is silent and dark and, for the first time, you can feel your determination seeping away from you.

There is a man there, at the end of the hallway. He is turned towards you, staring out into space, not noticing your presence despite the fact that he’s looking right at you. His face is cracked open, and you step away from his gaze. Any trace of determination you had left has disappeared.

“Hello?”

You realize that it is a skeleton. You jump away the moment his expression changes from neutral to horrified, and a screech emits from his cracked mouth, before something- _something_ -

There is a glitch in the system.

The man is gone.

You walk down the silent hallway with your lack of determination etched into your face, and once you leave, you wonder - is he still there? Was he just shocked?

The door is gone. The wall where it used to be is dark blue and silent, like the rest of Waterfall.

You don’t turn around when a familiar presence situates itself over your shoulder.

* * *

<FAILED RESET>

<RECOVERING LOST DATA...>

You’re lost in a hurricane of strings of code and strange flashes in your eyes, pervading into the depths of your being. You don’t have your orange and blue eyes anymore, you realize - where did they go? You couldn’t be dead yet. You had experiments to conduct, you needed to finish the core, what would your followers think?

You don’t think about that.

You imagine.

The vague figure from hundreds of memories before is there, in front of your eyes, speaking to one of your followers. They smile at the figure, but it is a strained smile, with no real heart, and- what is that, in their hand? A fragment, but of what? The fragment smiles, and it feels so familiar, but you can’t quite tell what it is.

_I’m holding a piece of him right here._

Their voice echoes through your mind. You’re looking at the future. Your mind is dull, and you feel electricity coursing through your body.

But... something they said. A piece of who?

A piece of you?

You look at your hands. They have holes where the palms should be, only the thinnest strings of bones connecting your fingers to your wrist.

So, it really was a piece of you.

Huh.

You watch the figure talk to the gray head that was your third (and supposedly, final, if your “memories” had anything to say about it) follower, before the head turns to look at you, make careful eye contact at you.

_After all, it’s rude to talk about someone who’s listening._

The smile winks out of existence, and the figure turns as well.

_You_ -

_Yo **u**_ -

<RECOVERED DATA CORRUPT>

<REPLACING DATA...>

You see two figures in front of you. One has a blue eye, and the other an orange one. They are **your** eyes.

Your name is Gast-

Your name is _Gaste-_

Yo u r na m _e is_ **ss Gas** te _r_

<DATA REPLACED>

You are not replaced.

<DATA REPLACED>

You are standing in a pristine white room. Somebody is speaking to you - is it that vague figure from before?

<DATA REPLACED>

You try to speak, but something interrupts and all that comes out of your mouth is a horrifying shriek.

**< D A T A  R E P L A C E D>**

Something _breaks_ , something in the system _tears aw **ay the core of your being**_.

<TIMELINE RESET?>

**Y** /N

* * *

 

Sans smiles at you, but something about it feels fake, like he’s forcing himself to. Something about this save feels fake. The smile is plastic, you cannot feel liquid courage flow through your veins, Papyrus doesn’t laugh the same way he did so many times before, and you cannot feel the familiar surge of determination flow through you as you reach the same points as you did before.

There was something you needed to remember. It was important. Something about a man with a cracked smile and dual-colored eyes, but-

You can’t quite grasp it. It stands on the edge of your memory.

You walk down the corridor to the River Person, who turns to you with a familiarly shadowed face. The boat peels away from the shores of Hotland, and you can’t help but feel - no, not determination. The faintest sense of deja vu.

“Tra la la,” they hum. “Beware of the man who speaks in hands.”

**Author's Note:**

> oh man this took longer than i thought it would to write (especially bc i fucked up one major part in the middle and messed up canon info)  
> anyway i love gaster  
> also on tumblr [here](http://the-eighth-colour.tumblr.com/post/132587372964/forget-about-me)


End file.
